>>51480455the issue isn't custom tags in this case but more that ao3 staff are alright with ship tags and the gen category being selectable at the same time, and that there's no inbuilt link between ship tags and categories
ideally every ship tag should just auto-change the categories to add in f/m or f/f or whatever, but instead you can have ash/goh stories just get tagged as gen for example, which in certain fandoms means you're stuck going through filtering all the popular gay ships anyway despite already hiding m/m
i imagine it's probably like that because of the effort involved in changing all the old tags and the possibility that people might write r63 stories so there'd need to be a way to work with that without making another loophole for the pricks, but that effort would go a long way in curbing all these sneaky faggots deliberately avoiding using the ship categories
now a custom tag that should've never existed that is kinda related to this shit is pre-slash - that one is absolute shit, a free card to make a gen story technically gay despite having nothing gay in it, and ruins otherwise fine stories by making it very clear that this good friendship between two characters is in fact going to end up being gay and it was never thought of as just a friendship in the first place
whoever decided to make that a common tag that can be easily used needs whacking on the head
